Features/Thunderbird/Improved Build System

Status

[up for grabs][This is not a feature as such, but a set of improvements to the build system for Thunderbird]

Team

Product manager

`

Directly Responsible Individual

Mark Banner

Lead engineer

`

Security lead

`

Privacy lead

`

Localization lead

`

Accessibility lead

`

QA lead

`

UX lead

`

Product marketing lead

`

Operations lead

`

Additional members

`

Open issues/risks

`

Stage 1: Definition

1. Feature overview

Thunderbird has a complex build system. In comm-central there is a near-duplicate clone of the mozilla-central build system, that supports building of Thunderbird. Not only that, but both build systems are required to build Thunderbird.

Due to the build system not being an exact copy, there are high porting and maintenance overheads to keep up to date with mozilla-central. These need to be reduced.

As well as the build system, there are improvements to the packaging system to be made to help ensure Thunderbird is shipping with the correct files.

2. Users & use cases

Developers and building of Thunderbird.

3. Dependencies

`

4. Requirements

`

Non-goals

`

Stage 2: Design

5. Functional specification

`

6. User experience design

`

Stage 3: Planning

7. Implementation plan

For the build-config part, there's several possible stages:

1) In comm-central, prototype the extraction of Thunderbird and Mailnews specific arguments into a sub-configure file that is called from the configure file, but is as minimal as possible and does not duplicate the build system into the sub-configure (bug 648980)

2) Reduce the differences between the main comm-central and mozilla-central configures.

3) Investigate keeping comm-central in sync with mozilla-central using scripts or modified files.